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Digital Observatory for Protected Areas

Brief me

The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) is a set of web services and applications that can be used primarily to assess, monitor, report and possibly forecast the state of and the pressure on protected areas at multiple scales. The data, indicators, maps and tools provided by the DOPA are relevant to a number of end-users including policy makers, funding agencies, protected area agencies and managers, researchers and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The information can be used, for example, to support spatial planning, resource allocation, protected area development and management, and national and international reporting. Using global reference datasets, the DOPA supports global assessments but also provides a broad range of consistent and comparable indicators at country, ecoregion and protected area level.


Objectives

The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas aims to provide:

The best information available (data, maps, indicators, models), agreed on by contributing institutions, to support research and reporting on protected areas.
Free web based tools (databases, portals, web services) designed to support decision making and capacity building activities for conservation.
An interoperable and, as much as possible, open source framework to allow institutions to develop their own means to assess and monitor the state of and pressure on protected areas.

Dive into the data

Explore and download data, geospatial layers, create maps and share them.

DOPA Explorer

Key information on protected areas globally

Check it out

eConservation (beta)

Who is funding what and where for biodiversity conservation

Check it out


Citing the DOPA

The DOPA should be cited as following:

European Commission, Joint Research Centre (year). The Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) [On-line], [insert month/year of the version accessed], Ispra, Italy